You might be asking what the fuck is going on with the schedule. To that I say, watch your fucking language, there are kids around. Let’s get your brain meat warm so you can learn yourself some kickball ingenuity.
Origin story: A long long time ago in a gillis far away, there were two leagues. One was for the good teams, one was for the ….. other teams. This worked out greatish, actually terribly. The first thing that happened was that the “good” league had fewer teams who wanted to play in it. That’s no fun, so the league (a partially owned subsidiary of GLOBOCHEM an explosives and surgery beverage firm) decided it would choose which teams would play in which league. This tyranny was met with an easily rigged, but popular effort for team captains to rank each other on play, musical taste, and effability. Mostly play though. The big problem that some of us visionary heros saw was that teams change from season to season, and you would frequently have teams lose every game in the top division and win every game in the bottom. It was not fun to be on, or play against these teams. What to do?
Manna: God bestows on but few the abilities necessary to address such a conflagration. Lucky are you, dear reader, lucky indeed. Through a quirk of mathematics, geometry, and to a lesser extent, black magic the leagues were united under the provision that teams would play other similarly skilled teams, with a few games sprinkled in for variety. Below is the format, where the rows and colums are the teams, grey squares are scheduled games between them, and the numbers in them are the relativistic mismatch of the teams. Higher numbers indicate bigger mismatches. We wanted to keep this number low.
Now for the schedule, this is interesting, at least to me. I don’t have a mathematical proof to this effect, but I’m willing to bet a lot of money that there is only one way to ensure every team plays one game a week. AAAAAnnd we found it.
The numbers are the week the game takes place, and the final row is they bye week. As a coincidence of nature each bye week has just two teams off, and amazingly, they are always teams that play each other at some point during the season. After much thought and sacrificial burnings, we decided to throw in an extra game. The bye week games are just that.
For which fields and times, that was also done with a culturally progressive flourish
The Blowback: All great innovations are met with skepticism, luddites, and village people with torches. This is no different. I understand that some people will lose more games this way, but other will win more. As a matter of fact, I guarantee there will be the same number of wins as losses. I am THAT confident. As for “fairness” the only complaint is not with the schedule, but with the preseason rankings. Mind you, that burden was previously placed only on the middle 6 or so teams, now we all share it. But again, this system is BETTER for next seasons preseason rankings. It is much easier to tell which teams are how good when you can see their overall playing ability against a wider range.
Rankings: This will be the crowning achievement, and yet we have too little data to test the model. A form of power ranking similar to algorithms for college basketball is being used to determine team rank. This will be provided to all the captains hopefully in season, but more importantly, during the preseason rankings next season.
In conclusion: This is good. You are bad for not liking it. You should feel bad about feeling the way you do.
But seriously, I’d like to hear everyones thoughts. I really think this is a better way forward, but if you disagree, I really want to hear it. Thanks -Ted
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